Bullet Time
by HartxStarr
Summary: Taking a step back, Church contemplates a few things. If he learns anything at all, it's that even AIs can be too slow. - Hanahaki AU


No medical procedure is one hundred percent accurate—sad isn't it?

With his last line of defense having failed, the wearing strings of his hope, his last breath drawn, wary and broken, teary-eyed and high from the meds, he come to terms with the inevitable: love hurts. But don't worry, Tucker. Things always eventually find a way to work itself out one way or another, doesn't it?

Doesn't it?

* * *

Love's weird. Church, you don't understand it. A foreign term; unobtainable, indescribable, so far out of reach from your sense of consciousness that you physically cannot grasp it—or would the proper wording be _mentally?_ You don't know, of course.

Words scramble in your mind. Romance, intimacy, sex, vulnerability, you suppose that these concepts had once been a small fraction in your life at some point or another. But was it really _your_ life? Not really. You wouldn't say so, no.

You try to put the pieces together, draw the line between what was yours and the belongings of each and every individual that you've ever shared a central nervous system with. How many people were you? One, two, three? Do you count yourself? You don't know. Does it matter? You suppose not. That isn't the matter at hand here, anyway.

You pull up a quick search through your database. _Your brain,_ you correct yourself, it's your _brain._ Never mind the fact that you were made up entirely of ones, zeroes, memory banks, and journal entries—you had a _brain_ now. Your _own_ brain. Not a shared one or a ghost of one, a shadow of a brain or a barest _hint_ of one, but a honest-to-god brain.

 _(You_ used _to have a brain,_ the nagging voice in the back of your mind told you. You don't know who it belonged to. _Back before you tore yourself to shreds. You used to have one, then another, and another—)_

You were getting off track. Hanahaki—what was that? A disease. Sounds fictional. Flower petals don't magically grow inside of people (the old scientist in you would like to test that theory out, though), much less the entire blossom itself. The whole bush, thorns and leaves and pollen combined—damn, that must suck for allergies. Hacking shit up and fucking with your already watered eyes, you're glad you don't have a body anymore.

(Of course, that is an absolute lie. But you lie to yourself a tad bit more to convince yourself that it isn't a lie at all. You do that a lot, don't you Church?)

 _Hanahaki,_ your search found. _A disease cultivated by the intense suffering of unrequited love._ And there's that word again—you pull up a separate search. _Love is the intense feeling of deep affection or attachment to someone or something._ Okay, you were getting somewhere.

You stop yourself from looking up any more terms that you were curious about. There just wasn't enough nanoseconds when you were stalling through bullet time, in between one moment and the next; the fraction of time you accumulated for youself half a beat before the others could even begin to process the bombshell that was just dropped. You spent most of your time-slice in shock—way longer than you would ever dare to admit—and now you fear that there isn't enough time left to work through the knowledge, compartmentalizing each line of thought before you got too carried away.

Trying to find out where you went wrong—because this was your fault, right? This was all you; digging deeper into your memory banks, through factual accounts and secondhand both, the pieces were finally falling into place. Hanahaki, the reason for Tucker's ultimate demise—this was your fault. Church, you killed Tucker.

 _(I'm the team-killing fucktard,_ that little voice in your head sounded more like yours than it ever had before. For once you didn't tell it to shut up.)

You were Church— _Epsilon._ Not Alpha. You realize this, have known this for so long, you thought the others realized this too. Surely _Tucker_ had known, must have, _should_ have—were you really starting to blame _him?_

You didn't know what to do. You couldn't stop yourself.

 _He held your hand before you died that first time. Had ran to you, chucking off his helmet, skidding to a stop on his knees beside you. Shock clear on his face, he tried and failed to get a response._

 _Angrily, he lashed out at Caboose._

 _He turned back to you in the split second after, you having found your voice. You had wanted to reassure him, truly you did, but then his attention was on you. The whole of it, unbridled and uninhibited. Suddenly, it became too much. You thought maybe it would have been more bearable had his helmet been on, visors made formality in social situations, so when you shifted in your feeble position and caught his eyes (they were a different color back then), you said the first thing that came to mind._

 _"I'm not gonna make it," it was a little slurred and it took a little while to conjure, but you managed. Too bad your words seemed to have the opposite effect you were going for. Tucker had the most expressive face you've ever seen. You could read his every thought with a face like that—and you usually did. So when it seemed like he was cracking at the seams at your declaration, he probably was._

 _You panicked. "Tucker—" you didn't know what to say. "There's something I need to tell you." Was there?_

 _At his inquiry, all logic left your mind. His earnestness, the way he shifted, his entire focus on you. His whole existence seemed to singled down to that exact moment, ready to hang off of your every word. You remember—it felt defensive when you told him you hated him. Strange._

 _His face had crumbled and he released your hand. You didn't know what to do then, cold so suddenly, so quickly, it left you reeling. (You had a body to call your own back then, flesh and bone; yours for the short time you had it.) Without any words left to utter, you decided to let unconsciousness take you; it felt cringy to think about. Alpha was a bitch._

Tucker had always gravitated towards you—it was a testament to just how long you hid in bullet time to be able to easily refer to him in past tense. He was always near you, but it wasn't _only_ that. He always found a reason to touch you, bump shoulders with you, sit next to you, stood so much nearer to you than with others. He'd always look in your direction, seeking a smile or a laugh, validation, an emotion.

Thinking back, you realize that you (a different version of you; you before you were _you)_ had begun to do the same. You would always find one another, never far. It became a habit—second nature to lean against one another, rest on a shoulder, snake an arm around a waist. You had always chalked it up to one of Alpha's traits, being so casual even in the sight of others. A quirk that you never picked up on, even with his memories, with Caboose emphasizing it during his countless stories—physical contact was never a problem for you as Epsilon (how can it when you spent most of your time joy riding a nervous system?) Public affection, however, was.

Even with a robot body, cold and mechanical, Alpha was constantly near Tucker, regardless of the scenery. You remembered your first body, the one you could really consider to be your own, unshared and individual.

 _When you had been reborn into a new you, he had spent over a year maturing, growing. You were reunited. This was a different sort of meeting though. His helmet was on for one, so you couldn't decipher what exactly was on his mind. But that was okay, the rest of him spoke loudly enough. Too loudly. He kept his distance when he had asked incredulously, suspiciously, if you were really you. The you he remembers._

 _You weren't. But you didn't know that, at the time. All you knew was that the aqua one was supposed to be dead. Caboose told you so. Back then, you believed in everything he said because that was all you had. The memories came to you eventually first in waves, then suddenly all at once in a moment of pure clarity that you felt so stupid for not having remembered._

 _But that was later on. In that moment, Tucker had sprung a pop quiz on you, as if he didn't truly believe you were really the you Caboose was making you out to be._

 _You weren't, but neither of you understood the intricacies of that back then._

 _He continued his aversion towards you, keeping a physical as well as an emotional distance, even going so far as to hesitate before calling you by name. His hostility irked you, but you had been moreso focused on trying to figure out how to work your new spherical, super cool body._

 _The two of you bonded over laser beams and ancient alien artifacts. You remember—being treated like an object, to your face no less, you had surveyed the scene; not-C.T. had cornered Tucker, gun raised._

 _You lost your temper._

 _Tucker was ecstatic. To the charred corpse of what had been not-C.T., he gave him the finger with a bounce in his step before turning to you, plucking you straight out of the air. It was a complete turn around. Had you been more_ you _at the time, you would have found the gesture familiar._

 _"Church," there wasn't any hesitation there, "how did you do that?" His helmet remained on, not much of a social scene, but you could picture it—his beaming face as he held you up to his visor._

 _You were still getting used to all your new bells and whistles, but Tucker wasn't deterred. "Can you do that again?" he had asked, smile dripping from every word. "Like, to the yellow guy or something?"_

 _"I guess," your new status as God made you feel pretty good, actually. You didn't mind smitting a couple more. However, you hadn't even noticed your audience. Suddenly, you felt uncomfortable. "I'm not really sure."_

 _You had wiggled your way out of his hold with the perfectly timed excuse to peer over the edge of the temple with Caboose._

 _This became sort of routine until eventually Tucker gave you your personal space back. And by then, you had another shiny-new artificial body and other troubles to worry about. Recursion happens, you started to pick up the pieces that Alpha left behind._

Alpha had a lot of problems. You've been in plenty of people's heads to figure that he had a lot more than he knew what to do with. So, he didn't deal with them at all. That just made things worse, which made it all more harder for you to fix things. The more you were _you,_ the more you wanted to be better than your past self.

The Tucker problem, however, was more so pushed to the side. Think about it, Church. You really did kill him. You had planted something deep within him—cultivated it. You didn't know who you were, he didn't either, but while you spent all that time defining yourself, he was left to catch up.

And he never really did, did he?

You've been in Tucker's mind before. You had tried not to snoop, neat little shelves not yours for the peeking—but in that moment, when his entire existence intertwined with yous, your physical foundation rooted down into his very core, for a moment, those shelves had been yours.

And you felt it then, the pure frustration and anxiety overflowing all at once. The memory that wasn't yours but is now embedded into your brain forever because you're him now too, just a little bit.

 _"All I wanna do is stand around and talk to my friend," his memory echoed. And friend had never tasted so bitter on your—his—tongue. Friend and leader and abandonment become synonymous with_ Church. _Just like how Church was to Alpha and Epsilon—he saw the clear differences. He didn't want to admit the Church he knew was gone._

 _You were so caught up in following the plan, not poking around where shouldn't, that you didn't even notice what he was going through. You didn't get comfortable; his vitals were never accessed. You were too busy failing step two._

 _Then he got stabbed, but that was a different story._

You analyzed the data and hundreds more, over-examining until you convinced yourself that you were just wasting precious time. You knew the results, knew you were at fault. What more was there to it?

You knew he had been booked for surgery but never pried as to what for. Again with the procrastination. Your search had told you that surgery was bad for the disease. Trying to cut the physical feeling out didn't always work. The result may lead to a quicker demise.

 _Guess that's what happened to Tucker._

You spent the remaining dregs of your nanoseconds thinking about how many hours Tucker must have spent bent over the toilet bowl; hacking up petal after petal. You wondered how long it took them to eventually be replaced with whole flowers. How many flowers did it take before he made the appointment that ended his life?

You wondered—was it too late? Or were you so interwoven within him that cutting you out was the worst possible choice to have made? How much had it hurt? You couldn't imagine it; the suffering of restrained lungs, a heart encaged, beating out as the flowers bloomed and the tendrils grew piercing thorns.

How much did you ruin him?

Even through your search, there were so many things you couldn't grasp. But it was too late. Tucker was gone and time was up. As you return to the mortal realm, just remember: there wasn't anything that you could have done, Church.

(Was there?)


End file.
